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Author: Michael C. Schoenfeldt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780521669023
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExplores the close relationship between inner psychology and bodily processes as represented in English Renaissance poetry.
Author: Laura H. Friedman
Publisher:
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Eve Keller
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2011-11-15
Total Pages: 261
ISBN-13: 0295990767
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGenerating Bodies and Gendered Selves examines the textured interrelations between medical writing about generation and childbirth - what we now call reproduction - and emerging notions of selfhood in early modern England. At a time when medical texts first appeared in English in large numbers and the first signs of modern medicine were emerging both in theory and in practice, medical discourse of the body was richly interwoven with cultural concerns. Through close readings of a wide range of English-language medical texts from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, from learned anatomies and works of observational embryology to popular books of physic and commercial midwifery manuals, Keller looks at the particular assumptions about bodies and selves that medical language inevitably enfolds. When wombs are described as "free" but nonetheless "bridled" to the bone; when sperm, first seen in the seventeenth century by the aid of the microscope, are imagined as minute "adventurers" seeking a safe spot to be "nursed": and when for the first time embryos are described as "freeborn," fully "independent" from the females who bear them, the rhetorical formulations of generating bodies seem clearly to implicate ideas about the gendered self. Keller shows how, in an age marked by social, intellectual, and political upheaval, early modern English medicine inscribes in the flesh and functioning of its generating bodies the manifold questions about gender, politics, and philosophy that together give rise to the modern Western liberal self - a historically constrained (and, Keller argues, a historically aberrant) notion of the self as individuated and autonomous, fully rational and thoroughly male. An engagingly written and interdisciplinary work that forges a critical nexus among medical history, cultural studies, and literary analysis, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves will interest scholars in early modern literary studies, feminist and cultural studies of the body and subjectivity, and the history of women's healthcare and reproductive rights.
Author: Alanna Skuse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-02-18
Total Pages: 211
ISBN-13: 1108911501
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOffering an innovative perspective on early modern debates concerning embodiment, Alanna Skuse examines diverse kinds of surgical alteration, from mastectomy to castration, and amputation to facial reconstruction. Body-altering surgeries had profound socio-economic and philosophical consequences. They reached beyond the physical self, and prompted early modern authors to develop searching questions about the nature of body integrity and its relationship to the soul: was the body a part of one's identity, or a mere 'prison' for the mind? How was the body connected to personal morality? What happened to the altered body after death? Drawing on a wide variety of texts including medical treatises, plays, poems, newspaper reports and travel writings, this volume will argue the answers to these questions were flexible, divergent and often surprising, and helped to shape early modern thoughts on philosophy, literature, and the natural sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Author: Sara D. Luttfring
Publisher:
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 231
ISBN-13: 9781317534440
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Mary Floyd-Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2020-04-15
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 0198852746
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGeographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England gathers essays from prominent scholars of English Renaissance literature and history who have made substantial contributions to the study of early modern embodiment, historical phenomenology, affect, cognition, memory, and natural philosophy. It provides new interpretations of the geographic dimensions of early modern embodiment, emphasizing the transactional and dynamic aspects of the relationship between body and world. The geographies of embodiment encompass both cognitive processes and cosmic environments, and inner emotional states as well as affective landscapes. Rather than always being territorialized onto individual bodies, ideas about early modern embodiment are varied both in their scope and in terms of their representation. Reflecting this variety, this volume offers up a range of inquiries into how early modern writers accounted for the exchanges between the microcosm and macrocosm. It engages with Gail Kern Paster's groundbreaking scholarship on embodiment, humoralism, the passions, and historical phenomenology throughout, and offers new readings of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, John Milton, and others. Contributions consider the epistemiologies of navigation and cartography, the significance of geohumoralism, the ethics of self-mastery, theories of early modern cosmology, the construction of place memory, and perceptions of an animate spirit world.
Author: Mary Elizabeth Fissell
Publisher:
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 0199269882
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMaking babies was a mysterious process in seventeenth-century England. Fissell uses popular sources - songs, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to recover how ordinary men and women understood the processes of reproduction. Because the human body was so often used as a metaphor for social relations, the grand events of high politics such as the English Civil War reshaped popular ideas about conception and pregnancy. This book is the first account of ordinary people's ideas about reproduction, and offers a new way to understand how common folk experienced the sweeping political changes that characterized early modern England.
Author: Gideon Manning
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2020-04-06
Total Pages: 202
ISBN-13: 3030393755
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book reconnects health and thought, as the two were treated together in the seventeenth century, and by reuniting them, it adds a significant dimension to our historical understanding. Indeed, there is hardly a single early modern figure who took a serious interest in one but not the other, with their attitudes toward body-mind interaction often revealed in acts of self-diagnosis and experimentation. The essays collected here specifically reveal the way experiment and especially self-experiment, combined with careful attention to the states of mind which accompany states of body, provide a new means of assessing attitudes to body-mind interactions just as they show the abiding interest and relevance of source material typically ignored by historians of science and historians of philosophy. In the surviving records of such experimenting on one’s own body, we can observe leading figures like Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, deliberately setting out to repeat pleasurable, or intellectually productive moods and states of mind, by applying the same medicine on successive occasions. In this way we can witness theories of the working of the human mind being developed by key members of an urban culture (London; interregnum Oxford) who based those theories in part on their own regular, long-term use of self-administered, mind-altering substances. It is hardly an overstatement to claim that there was a significant drug culture in the early modern period linked to self-experimentation, new medicines, and the new science. This is one of the many things this volume has to teach us.
Author: Michelle M. Dowd
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-15
Total Pages: 195
ISBN-13: 1317129377
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBy taking account of the ways in which early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing, the essays collected here interrogate the discursive contours of gendered identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The contributors explore how generic choice, mixture, and revision influence narrative constructions of the female self in early modern England. Collectively they situate women's life writings within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular rhetorical devices and narrative structures that comprise individual texts. Reconsidering women's life writing in light of recent critical trends-most notably historical formalism-this volume produces both new readings of early modern texts (such as Margaret Cavendish's autobiography and the diary of Anne Clifford) and a new understanding of the complex relationships between literary forms and early modern women's 'selves'. This volume engages with new critical methods to make innovative connections between canonical and non-canonical writing; in so doing, it helps to shape the future of scholarship on early modern women.
Author: David Houston Wood
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-02-24
Total Pages: 210
ISBN-13: 1317010124
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExploiting a link between early modern concepts of the medical and the literary, David Houston Wood suggests that the recent critical attention to the gendered, classed, and raced elements of the embodied early modern subject has been hampered by its failure to acknowledge the role time and temporality play within the scope of these admittedly crucial concerns. Wood examines the ways that depictions of time expressed in early modern medical texts reveal themselves in contemporary literary works, demonstrating that the early modern recognition of the self as a palpably volatile entity, viewed within the tenets of contemporary medical treatises, facilitated the realistic portrayal of literary characters and served as a structuring principle for narrative experimentation. The study centers on four canonical, early modern texts notorious among scholars for their structural- that is, narrative, or temporal- difficulties. Wood displays the cogency of such analysis by working across a range of generic boundaries: from the prose romance of Philip Sidney's Arcadia, to the staged plays of William Shakespeare's Othello and The Winter's Tale, to John Milton's stubborn reliance upon humoral theory in shaping his brief epic (or closet drama), Samson Agonistes. As well as adding a new dimension to the study of authors and texts that remain central to early modern English literary culture, the author proposes a new method for analyzing the conjunction of character emotion and narrative structure that will serve as a model for future scholarship in the areas of historicist, formalist, and critical temporal studies.
